This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
As interactive vehicular electronic systems become more complex, vehicle cockpit designers and engineers continue to look for new and better ways to allow a vehicle occupant to control these systems. Of course, the classic approach is to provide an array of buttons and knobs on the dashboard of the vehicle. There is a practical limit, however, to the number of buttons and knobs that a vehicle occupant will find manageable. Reducing the number of buttons and knobs and replacing those with layers of menu screens has been tried, as has voice control. Menu screens require the vehicle occupant to look at the screen and comprehend what is being displayed there. Even if this takes only a split second, this is time the vehicle occupant is not focused on traffic or other environmental conditions. Voice control offers a different problem. Noise levels within the vehicle cockpit can significantly degrade the reliability of speech recognizers, meaning that some voiced commands may simply not work as intended.
As an alternative to these conventional vehicular control mechanisms, there is some interest today in gestural control. The vehicle occupant makes a hand gesture in the air, which is captured by non-contact sensors and converted into a command for controlling a vehicular electronic system. Such gestural controls have not heretofore been successful, in part because of the wide variance in gestural motions. As more fully explained below, some of this wide variance is due to the fact that the vehicle is moving, often in unpredictable ways. Automotive vehicles are subject to bumps in the road. Airplanes are subject to turbulence in the air. Boats are subject to waves. All of these factors represent sources of noise that make the gesture signal hard to interpret. The problem is even further compounded by the fact that the person making the gestural command may consciously or unconsciously try to compensate for the bumps, turbulence or waves. Human reaction times can vary over a fairly wide range. Thus, when trying to compensate for bumps, there may be little consistency from person to person.